Steve Kuhn is a sports entrepreneur and investor best known for helping build Major League Pickleball and for his conviction that sports remain one of the last great forces for human connection. After years in finance and investing, Steve turned his focus to sports as a cultural, economic, and social platform — drawn by its ability to bring people together across borders, beliefs, and generations. From pickleball’s rapid rise in Asia to the global expansion of participation sports, Steve’s career reflects a belief that sports are both a powerful asset class and a deeply human one.
Today, Steve is building SportsPredict, a free-to-play platform designed to measure and elevate the skill of sports prediction itself. Inspired by rating systems in chess and the success of Fantasy Premier League, SportsPredict introduces a global “SMART rating” that allows users to prove how accurate they are at forecasting sports outcomes — without gambling or financial risk. His vision is to create the world’s largest prediction game, helping millions (and eventually billions) of people develop better decision-making skills under uncertainty.
In this conversation, Steve shares how sports, data, psychology, and technology intersect — and why prediction literacy may become one of the most important skills of the next generation. From the growth of pickleball across Asia to the rise of prediction markets, and from storytelling in modern sports leagues to building new forms of interactive competition, Steve outlines a future where sports are not just watched, but understood, predicted, and experienced in entirely new ways.
Podcast Chapters:
03:55 The Global Rise of Pickleball
08:17 Sports Ecosystem in Asia
12:25 Innovations in Sports Technology
16:30 The Future of Sports Prediction
18:41 The Rise of Fantasy Sports
20:18 Understanding Prediction Markets
23:09 Innovative Business Models in Sports
27:35 The Future of Sports Prediction
31:18 Storytelling in Sports